


Not Anymore

by bluestargirl6 (pressdbtwnpages)



Category: The OC
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-04-01
Updated: 2010-04-01
Packaged: 2017-10-08 14:07:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 701
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/76407
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pressdbtwnpages/pseuds/bluestargirl6
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>It's a little bit crazy, Seth thinks, that he's standing at Marissa Cooper's grave.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	Not Anymore

  
Seth is not built to be the strong one.

Like, he physically isn't. I mean, Jesus, his shoulders aren't even wide enough to cry on, and his chest isn't a pillow, hell, he's practically convex.

Seth's not built to be the strong one.

But he's got Summer tucked under one arm and Ryan barely restrained by the wrist and Seth, Seth of all people should not be the one in control. He should not be the comforting one, the wise one, the one keeping his two best friends from leaping into the grave of their Fab Fourth.

It's not like things between the four of them were ever all that fab anyway, and Seth thinks the word fab sarcastically because how else can you think it? But, Really, Seth's trying to remember a time when all four of them were good and happy. When they were all together, or were all friends at least, and no one's mom was sleeping with anybody or drinking anything and no one's dad was involved in any sketchy business deals and there were no sideline friends tempting them into danger or drama or anything else.

Seth can't remember any good times that were more than fleeting. No, wait, that's a lie. He can't remember any perfect times. Any perfect times that didn't last longer than pancakes at the diner.

The diner. A place he'll possibly never be able to go to again.

At least not with Summer and Ryan. Or Summer or Ryan. If Seth wants chocolate chip pancakes anytime in the next twenty years he's going to have to get them himself. Or learn to make them. Seth thinks he may have just sworn off chocolate chip pancakes.

But, yeah, good times at the diner. Mostly. When he wasn't being hassled or Ryan wasn't punching someone or getting conned into things that were bad ideas

Seth can think of a negative to every memory he's remembered. But then he thinks about Before.

Before will always be capitalized in Seth's head because everything changed so completely the morning Ryan walked into the living room and into Seth.

Before, Seth's life sucked. And in comparison most of the moments since then, excepting things like right now, have pretty much been fab.

It's a little bit crazy, Seth thinks, that he's standing at Marissa Cooper's grave. Four years ago she was the girl next door. The girl next door who wouldn't give him the time of day. It turns out that they had a lot of common. The people they loved, for one thing.

Seth guesses, watching his girlfriend and his best friend tear themselves up from missing her, that he might never have known Marissa. That her death would have been in the newspaper, a lucky-it-wasn't-me moment after graduation, when, inevitably a few drunk kids crash their new cars and it's all "so sad" and "tragic" and "oh her poor parents" out loud and "how hard is it to drive around a damn curve? She deserves what she got" on the inside.

It occurs to Seth in a flash that he's burying his aunt today. Step-aunt. Former aunt. Step-daughter of his late grandfather. Marissa's dead and he had some attachment to her. Legal and emotional, they were all bound together in this insane, vaguely incestuous way.

It's weird, but it doesn't make Seth any more inclined to let Summer and Ryan lose to do their worst. To pay tribute to Marissa by doing the absolute most self-destructive thing they can think of. It'd be a nice homage, really, to go rent a hotel room, drink, play Russian Roulette and maybe down a couple handfuls of pills just to prove their all still alive, for however briefly.  
Seth looks down at the freshly dug reddish earth that contrasts so nicely with the fresh spring grass. He just can't make it real somehow, Marissa being dead.

Ryan's real, with the dark circles under his eyes and the tension like steel through his shoulders and the dozen words he's managed in six days.

Summer's real, with her crying and her limpness like a doll and the spark that's been missing from her eyes.

Marissa, she's not real. Not anymore.


End file.
